Vulgar History Podcast
The Other Boleyn Girls (and Boys)
August 12, 2026
Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster. I’m a historian and an author, and I’ve been curious about the Tudors since I was a small child. This season on the podcast, we’re talking about the notorious Tudors: who they were, the times they lived in, and what was happening elsewhere in the world at the same time.
Today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about Anne Boleyn’s family and her home. It’s not the Anne Boleyn episode yet. There’s so much background that’ll be helpful for when we eventually get to our Anne Boleyn episode. The timing of this is so perfect because Tracy Borman has a new novel out called The House of Boleyn. So, this is a book that tells the story of Anne Boleyn and her family from the point of view of what was happening at her house, which is a beautiful house you can visit now called Hever. So, it’s taking the story of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII, but it all takes place at this house, so kind of the people who are coming and going, so you get to really know who her family is and how that affected what happened to her. This book also explains – it’s a novel, but you learn so much, Tracy is a historian as well – you learn so much about the history of the family and how they rose up, and how this family got to the levels that they did, and how they then fell. And if you pay attention, you’ll see the connection between the Boleyn family and one of the stories we did last series about the Regency era. If you don’t notice it, I’ll clue you in after the episode as well.
But I do want to just explain Tracy Borman is Chief Historian of Historic Royal Palaces, Chief Executive of the Heritage Education Trust, Chancellor and Professor of Tudor History at Lincoln Bishop University, as well as being the author of many highly acclaimed books, both fiction and nonfiction, mostly taking place in the Tudor and/or Stuart eras. And I was really pleased she agreed to come be on Vulgar History to talk about her fantastic new novel, The House of Boleyn.
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Ann: So, I’m joined today by Tracy Borman, author of the new novel, The House of Boleyn. Welcome, Tracy.
Tracy: Hi, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to get into this.
Ann: I’m really excited to talk to you about this. I was able to read an early copy of the book, and I love my job, knowing that I can read a book and then I’ll get to ask all my questions to the author, and I have lots. [laughs]
Tracy: Oh, good, good! Oh, I’m really pleased you’re able to read it ahead, because it’s obviously not quite out yet where you are. So yeah, I’ll look forward to discussing it and hearing what you think about some of those… The women in particular, I think, are really, really interesting.
Ann: Exactly. Just so everybody knows, can you give sort of your… How do you explain this book to people, The House of Boleyn? What’s it about?
Tracy: Okay. So, what I usually say as the pitch over here in the UK, and I hope it translates okay, very popular series over here called Downton Abbey.
Ann: Oh, yes.
Tracy: So, it’s a kind of household, and it’s upstairs-downstairs. I basically say it’s Downton Abbey meets the Boleyns because The House of Boleyn, it’s a slight play on words in that the House of Boleyn is obviously, that’s the way you say a kind of family, but also, it is literally the house of Boleyn because the novel is entirely set at Hever Castle, which was the Boleyn’s absolutely beautiful fairy tale castle in the Kent countryside, so sort of southeast England.
The action doesn’t really leave Hever, or not for any length of time. It certainly doesn’t follow the Boleyns to court because I wanted to give a new take on the Boleyns, and that can be a tall order because it’s a familiar story. But I thought I wanted to show them as they really were, not when they’re being clever courtiers and putting on a show, but as real people, a real family struggling to survive. And I thought, you know, placing them in the home where they felt safe, they could let their guards down, was a great way to achieve that. It also enabled me to not only immerse myself during the research, but hopefully immerse my readers in what it was like living in a place like Hever Castle in the 1520s and ‘30s, and really the sights and sounds and smells. All of that, I wanted to make it very atmospheric. So, yes, it is the story of the Boleyns, the kind of rise and fall, but yeah, told through a different lens, I hope.
What I was also able to do is not just focus on the family above stairs, but weave in lots of different characters below stairs, the servants, and that’s when I used my imagination, because actually we know very little about the real servants at Hever. So yes, it’s this kind of upstairs-downstairs world that I hope to evoke.
Ann: Well, and what’s immediately, by setting it in Hever, what I found so fascinating is, you know, the story of Anne Boleyn and her family has been told many times, but it’s always through a lens of at court, what are they up to there? Which is not their home, and also her whole family didn’t travel there with her. Usually, we just hear about her father and maybe her uncle. But pivoting it over to the house, we get to meet the people she grew up with, because Hever is where Anne Boleyn spent so much of her time. So, what I would love… Because I learned so much, and it’s funny because it’s a novel, but obviously you did lots of research. I learned a lot about Anne Boleyn’s genealogy from this book.
Tracy: Oh, great! Yes, good. Yeah, because I did a lot of research into the Boleyns for this novel. I’ve spent a lot of my career researching and writing and talking about Anne Boleyn. I used to say it was my ambition to get through a whole day without saying her name, [Ann laughs] because she’s a lot of my life. But the other Boleyns, the sort of lesser-known Boleyns, not so much. And I really became hooked with their story.
As well, there’s this great myth that the Boleyns were nobody until Henry plucked them from obscurity and made them famous. In fact, they were a well-established family; they’d been on the rise for the best part of four centuries. French, came over with William the Conqueror in 1066, and steadily built up their wealth, their connections, and were really moving in royal circles, you know, almost a hundred years before Henry VIII came to the throne. So, yeah, they certainly weren’t these, kind of, nobodies that history tends to like to think they were. One of the women who really fascinated me the most was Anne’s paternal grandmother, Lady Margaret Butler.
Ann: Okay. I need to say you introduced me to Lady Margaret Butler in this book, and I am a huge fan now. What a woman!
Tracy: Oh, great!
Ann: What a figure. Can we start with her… Because she’s from Ireland. I don’t know how many people know that Anne Boleyn has this Irish connection to the Butlers, who are still a very prevalent family in that area where she’s from in Kilkenny.
Tracy: Yeah, I don’t think people do know this Irish connection, the ancestry of Anne Boleyn, but yes, it was hugely important because Margaret— And I’m so pleased you liked her because honestly, it’s probably my favourite. I shouldn’t have favourites, but she is. What Margaret did for the Boleyns was to introduce some much-needed pedigree because the Boleyns were doing well, as I said, they’re kind of building up their prosperity, their royal connections, but they were slightly looked down on as new money or trade, if you like. They weren’t all that aristocratic.
It was Geoffrey Boleyn who, in the 1400s, decided to make this prestigious marriage for his son, William, to this Irish heiress, Lady Margaret Butler. She was the daughter and co-heiress of the Earl of Ormond, one of the most distinguished noblemen in Ireland. Their home was beautiful, Kilkenny Castle in the Republic of Ireland. And this was a masterstroke by Geoffrey Boleyn, securing this marriage for his son, because that’s when you really get this injection of blue blood into the Boleyn family. Margaret as well was a huge influence on the Boleyns. She and William had numerous children. There’s really a sense of establishing a dynasty once Margaret comes over. She remains with her eldest son Thomas until the day she dies because her husband dies, Thomas becomes head of the family, and he obviously adores his mother, so he keeps her close.
She’s been lost to history, but I think she would have been a pivotal influence on Anne Boleyn growing up, to have this matriarch, this landowner and titled Irish heiress. I mean, her will would have been law, I think, at Hever, really. I don’t want to give too much away, but then something pretty catastrophic happens to Margaret in the year 1519, and I can tell you that was not fiction; I did not make up.
Ann: Honestly, when that happened – listeners, you can read the book and find out – but I was like, “Wait a minute.” I wasn’t sure what is fact and what is your imagination because Margaret is a character I didn’t know at all. I knew that she existed, but I did have to fact-check that because I thought, “Oh, that’s a turn. That’s disappointing.” But yeah.
Tracy: Absolutely. We know what happened, but not the whys and wherefores and what was behind it all. So, that’s when I spun a bit of a plot to explain this disaster that poor old Margaret suffers at this, kind of, midpoint when she’s riding high, and her son is head of the family, and she’s got all of this wealth inherited from her father, and then suddenly, yeah, it all goes horribly wrong for her. So, she does fight on, but what a fascinating woman. I love that little-known Irish connection.
By the way, it’s also thanks to Margaret that Anne Boleyn has that famous white falcon emblem because the white falcon was the Butler emblem, so she borrowed it from her grandmother and that Irish side of the family. Yeah, Anne rather liked that, thought, “Yeah, that’s pretty cool. Having a white falcon, I think I’ll have that. Thanks, Grandma.” [chuckles]
Ann: The connection that I made in my mind was just— My friends who I know in Ireland, I just know from them that there’s this typical Irish look with the dark hair, and I thought, “Oh! Well, this is where Anne Boleyn gets her famous dark hair from, the Irish side.”
Tracy: I didn’t know that. Is that typical then, that sort of, yeah, dark-haired? Well, there you go. That would explain it. Probably, I like to think she looked a bit like her grandmother. We actually don’t know, but that dark hair came from somewhere, and it wasn’t Anne’s mother, Elizabeth, who was likely fair-haired.
Ann: The Irish look.
Tracy: That’s the thing, yeah. I love it. And it’s a little-known side to Anne’s story, but then interestingly, her first real suitor, who anybody is talking about, was James Butler, who was a cousin of hers through her grandmother. But Anne did not like the idea of marrying her Butler cousin and moving to Ireland. She put a stop to all of that and created a bit of a scandal at court by daring to take the initiative in the issue of her own future. I don’t think her uncle Norfolk ever forgave her, because he was the one who was really championing this idea. It was a very neat solution to a problem that had arisen between the Butlers and Boleyns over who should have the title Earl of Ormond. Norfolk said, “Well, why doesn’t Anne marry James and then the whole thing will be settled?” But Anne had other ideas, as we know.
Ann: We’re here talking about your book, obviously. But I think if someone out there is also a novelist, that would be a very fascinating alternative history: What if Anne Boleyn had married and moved to Ireland? What would have happened? The trickle-down effect would be fascinating.
Tracy: Can you imagine? There are so many what-ifs as a historian. And also, what if she’d been allowed to marry the man she’d chosen? Henry Percy, the son of the Earl of Northumberland, who was a great catch, actually. In fact, so great a catch that Cardinal Wolsey stepped in and said, “No, come on. You’re aiming too high, Anne. You can’t have him.” [Ann laughs] But yeah, one of those great what-ifs. She might have just lived a very long and happy life. Who knows? Had lots of sons.
Ann: Perhaps. So, we have Lady Margaret Butler, and you have to imagine, again, because your book shifts the focus to Hever, and so we’re seeing who are the people who were there when Anne Boleyn was coming of age. So, I have to think, and I think you do too, that seeing this indomitable matriarch, that would rub off on Anne to say, “Okay, women’s roles can be powerful. They can be decisive,” right?
Tracy: Yeah, absolutely. It can’t have failed to be an influence because it was very rare for women to be heiresses in this period, to inherit land and property. So, Margaret was quite extraordinary in that respect, and there’s a real sense, even though the records are patchy, that her influence was pervasive at Hever and in shaping the sort of future of the Boleyns. She was certainly the foundress of the kind of dynasty, really, thanks to that marriage to William Boleyn. And yeah, Anne must have looked up to her grandmother thinking, “Wow, look at this woman. She’s got all this money, all these lands, titles.” She’s almost a woman living independently. Yes, she’s living at Hever with her son and his family, but I think that’s through choice. She could have established herself in a nice country house somewhere else. But she’s very… You very much get the sense with Margaret, she is a family woman, and she has ambitions for her family. So yes, Anne must have looked and learned, I think, from Margaret.
Ann: But if we look at her mother as well, which again, this is… As a women’s historian, I was I loved learning about the women and her family from your book, because so often when we see Anne Boleyn at court, it’s just her father and her uncle. Those are the only Boleyn relatives that we ever see in TV or film or fiction, usually. So, I was excited to learn more about her mother. What can you tell us about Elizabeth Howard?
Tracy: Yeah. So again, just like Thomas’s father married into aristocracy, so did Thomas himself. So, Elizabeth Howard, she was the daughter of the 2nd Duke of Norfolk. I mean, the Howards, they’re synonymous with power in the Tudor period, and they’d been close to the crown for centuries. It was a very, very distinguished family. And so, Elizabeth brought that pedigree. So, this is when, really, this match really starts to propel the Boleyns into the higher reaches of society.
Like her mother-in-law, Margaret, she was very good at establishing a dynasty. Thomas later reflected, “She gave me every year a child.” So, they seem to have had loads of kids. But of course, only three Boleyn siblings survived to adulthood, they being, and not necessarily in this order, but Mary, Anne and George. We do know, though, that at least two other boys were born to this marriage of Thomas and Elizabeth; there are memorials to them in the church next to Hever and also in the church next to Penshurst Place, intriguingly, which was really the Boleyns’ neighbour, the Duke of Buckingham’s place. So, there could have been other lost Boleyn children, likely there were. But on the one hand, Elizabeth, yes, she ticked the box, the number one box for a wife, you know, you’ve got to give your husband lots of heirs and spares, and she seems to have done that, including the vital male heir, George.
And she does stay close to her daughter, Anne. So, when Anne starts to rise to prominence at court, her mother goes with her. Henry arranges for Elizabeth to have apartments close to her daughters, and it seems that they’re quite a unit, her and Anne. So again, another influence on Anne growing up, and then when she’s in her kind of heyday. I would say that my portrayal of their relationship is quite negative in my novel because, you know, it’s all about opposites. When you’re writing fiction, heroes and villains, good and bad. You have Anne in my novel being very close to her father, so I had to juxtapose that with her not being quite so close to her mother. But the fact is, she probably was. She probably did get on pretty well with her. Certainly, Elizabeth Boleyn was close to her daughter, Anne, during her rise at court. So, interesting woman.
Now, it was rumoured that Elizabeth Boleyn once had an affair with Henry VIII himself. This is something he always strenuously denied because people said, you know, “You’ve had an affair with Mary Boleyn, Anne’s sister. Now you’re after Anne. And also, didn’t you have an affair with her mother?” And Henry always said, “Never with the mother.” He always denied that there was anything going on, but there was just a hint of scandal around Elizabeth Boleyn. The poet John Skelton wrote this fairly acerbic verse about her that hinted at immorality. But, you know, women didn’t have to do much to be accused of immorality, as you well know. So, there’s no firm evidence that Elizabeth’s virtue was ever compromised in that way.
Ann: Well, and something that comes across in your novel, and I’ve heard some of the other interviews you’ve given talking about it, is this charisma that the Boleyns all had. So, when you think about someone like Elizabeth, clearly people noticed her, whether or not she was doing these scandalous things. Can you talk a bit about this Boleyn… So, they had… You’ve described the, you know, the heiresses married in, and they’re this up-and-coming family. But the people themselves, like, people were drawn to them, all of them.
Tracy: Yes! Yeah, they were, and I do believe they must have had charisma in spades because they made it all the way to the very top, the dizzying heights, and they stood out at court. And yes, they were clever and brilliant people and very skilled political operators, but so were lots of other people at court. So, what made the Boleyns so special?
And with Anne, and I’m sorry to bring it down to physical appearance, but people were at pains to point out she’s not beautiful. It’s not like this absolute stunner walks into Henry’s court and, you know, everybody is completely under her spell; she’s not conventionally beautiful. That dark hair is not fashionable, it’s all about blondes and pale skin, and she’s sort of swarthy, as she’s described. But she has this sort of self-confidence, this literal je ne sais quoi from the years she spent in the French court before coming to England. And, you know, I think that carries through into the rest of her family. They seem to have just that charisma, that, perhaps, irreverence. They’re not afraid of the King; they’re not afraid of figures of authority; they don’t kowtow to them, even if they outrank them. There’s a little bit of cheek there, and I think people like Henry can’t resist that.
Another example of him not being able to resist somebody irreverent is his all-powerful minister, Anne’s future nemesis, Thomas Cromwell, who is definitely a commoner, but everybody talks about how cheeky and kind of charismatic he was. I think you needed charisma to get noticed at Henry’s court. Henry worked on personalities, not just politics. So, I think that has a lot to do with this dazzling rise, meteoric rise, of Tudor England’s most famous family.
Ann: Well, and even, I think, if we’re talking even before Henry begins pursuing Anne Boleyn, like the Boleyns, just as a unit, the family, they’re really stepping up, which is… Can you talk about Hever, the house itself, and how they acquired this beautiful palace?
Tracy: Yes, yes. So, the Boleyns acquired Hever in the 1400s. It was originally built in the 1380s, which was quite a turbulent period in English history with something called the Peasants’ Revolt, and that started close to Hever Castle, and they were rebelling against this new tax that the government had introduced. John de Cobham was the original owner of Hever, and unfortunately, he was a tax collector. He had to kind of fortify his house of Hever, and you can still see the three portcullises that John put in place at Hever to keep out those revolting peasants, as they were.
And then, Geoffrey Boleyn, who was one of those who really started to advance the family’s fortunes in the 1400s, he acquired two properties: Blickling Hall in Norfolk, which, the Boleyns were a Norfolk family, really, not originally a Kent family. But Geoffrey also thought, “Hmm, maybe we should get a place a bit closer to court,” and Hever was within a day’s ride of the court, and so he purchased it. He greatly embellished it, made it a sort of luxurious family residence; no longer any need for those port coulisses, but they kept them anyway. And then, it remained in Boleyn hands for quite some time.
From the year 1505, Hever became the Boleyns’ main residence. That’s when Thomas Boleyn thought, “Actually, let’s move out of Norfolk and Blickling Hall, let’s take up residence in Hever,” because it was just so much more convenient, both for the court, but by then, Thomas Boleyn had a reputation as a diplomat. He was always being sent overseas, and Hever is also a day’s ride from the coast, where he was always setting sail. So, it’s all about location. Nothing changes. You invest in a property that’s got a great location. That’s what Hever gave to the Boleyns.
But if you visit today, I was going to say it’s small. It’s bigger than my house. But it’s kind of a pocket-sized castle. You know, it’s quite contained. I think that must have lent itself to the tight-knit nature of the Boleyn family. You really get a sense that they’re a close family.
Ann: Well, and that’s where… I have not been to Hever yet myself. It’s on my bucket list of places I would like to go, but I presume you spent an awful lot of time there when you were researching this. So, when it was described as a palace, I was imagining something quite grand.
Tracy: I mean, it is a castle, so don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t be able to afford to buy it. [laughs] But it’s not huge. There’s probably three or four bedrooms at most, and just one great hall, and a parlour, and a great chamber. But you can walk around it in 15 minutes, really, if you’re whizzing through. It’s not one of these great palatial homes, but it is absolutely fairy tale-like; it’s surrounded by a moat, it has the turrets, it has those portcullises I mentioned. It’s magical. It was the biggest joy to spend a lot of time there while researching my novel.
Owen Emmerson, one of the curators there, he gave me this behind-the-scenes tour, which was just jaw-dropping because everyone wants to go in those doors that say “Private” on them or open up a door in the panelling that you haven’t noticed. That gave me so many details for the book, including, Owen showed me a secret cupboard in Anne Boleyn’s former bedchamber, and it’s hidden away in the panelling. So, of course, I had to write that in. That’s where she keeps her love letters (not necessarily from Henry, by the way).
So yeah, I think writing a novel like Hever, when it is so much about place, not just people, there was no substitute for just spending a lot of time there. They say you should always write a book that’s set somewhere that you want to spend time. I think that’s good advice. My next one’s going to be Venice, I think, or something like that.
Ann: [laughs] Well, I did want to say, like, you explained at the very beginning, the House of Boleyn, it’s the double-meaning; it’s the people, but it’s also the house. And I do feel like the house itself is a character in this book.
Tracy: Oh great! Brilliant.
Ann: You bring it to life so vividly. I was wondering, because it doesn’t surprise me you had this behind-the-scenes tour, because this book, there’s a scene or a mention of every single corner and crevice in this building, I think.
Tracy: That was music to my ears when you said about it being a character in the book, because literally that was my stated aim. In my proposal, when I was pitching this to the publishers, I said, “I want Hever to be a character, not just a backdrop with the occasional mention. It has to be pivotal. It has to be there, and readers have to feel it and get the texture of Hever.” So, thank you. That’s joyful.
Ann: I’m just curious. I’m just imagining, if I was in your shoes, walking around the house and being shown all of these secret passage— Not secret passageways but different corridors and things, was your mind just whirring, like, “Oh, somebody could overhear something here?” You’re just imagining the scenes that could happen.
Tracy: Absolutely. As I was going around with Owen, for example, saying, “Where would Anne have been reading all these love letters that Henry sent her?” We still have 17 of them in the Vatican archives, intriguingly. So, which rooms? So, Owen said, “Okay, well, let’s go in the best bed chamber,” great name, which probably Anne had once she’d caught the attention of the King, she gets an upgrade in her home, she gets to sleep in a better bed chamber. But also, Owen took me up on the roof of the castle. I always love a castle roof, despite my fear of heights. He said, “You can imagine Anne up there watching as the messenger is riding towards Hever with these letters.” He got really into it, kind of imagining scenes with me. So, we were able to concoct a few of those together.
But it got so that I knew the castle so well that even when I was back here, where I am now at my desk where I write my books, I was able to just close my eyes and imagine it. And then, of course, I took millions of photographs. I had a lot to look at, and I tried to describe as many of the original features as I could. So, yeah, it was so much fun. I found myself kind of missing Hever once I’d finished the novel. It’s like, aww! I quite enjoyed inhabiting that world for a few years.
Ann: Well, I don’t think this is going to spoil anything in your book, but guess what? Henry VIII [laughs] is drawn to Anne Boleyn and begins pursuing her. I think that’s widely known. In your book, and there’s also been some other recent books coming out that are sort of presenting it, not as Anne Boleyn, this seductive temptress luring him in – and it’s always, in those other older books, nothing against them at all, but the portrayal was often her father was almost pimping her out to try to get—
Tracy: Yes!
Ann: And your book, what feels more true to me is that she got his attention and she didn’t want it and she’s trying to get rid of him.
Tracy: Yeah, exactly. History has painted it in a very odd way, predictable way, perhaps. These older history books are products of their time, I think, and so, of course, you know, Anne Boleyn, just like her cousin, Catherine Howard, they have to be the kind of scheming seductresses, stealing the man away from his lawful wife. Whereas you’re quite right, I don’t get a sense Anne wanted Henry at all, and wanted to be married to him. Definitely, there’s no evidence.
In fact, there’s a lot of evidence to the contrary, that Thomas Boleyn was basically using his children as collateral damage in his rise to power and pushing Anne into the King’s path so that he would be greatly enriched by this, whether it was an affair or a marriage. Not a bit of it. You know, Thomas Boleyn’s already had one daughter ruined by Henry; Mary has an affair with the King and, you know, she’s left with her reputation in tatters and possibly an illegitimate child by Henry. He doesn’t want the same sort of thing to happen to Anne, and even he doesn’t want marriage because Thomas has worked at Henry VIII’s court since the beginning of the reign. He knows how dangerous the King is. You wouldn’t want that for your cherished daughter. And I think, you know, it wasn’t just a deliberate ploy, the fact that Anne keeps going back to Hever during the courtship. That’s been presented as, “Oh yeah, treat him mean, keep him keen.”
Ann: Playing hard to get, yeah.
Tracy: Yeah, it’s like, no, I think genuinely she wanted to get away from him and go back to Hever where she felt safe, and where she could be with her father and other family members, and sort of, you know, plan the next move, “How am I going to get out of this?” And it’s only when it became inevitable, really – there’s only so long you can say no to the King – that, okay, Anne decides to make the best of it. And, you know, she has ideas for her queenship; she’s not just going to be the producer of heirs, she wants to make a difference. So, I suppose that’s the payoff for Anne. She doesn’t really want to marry Henry, I don’t think for a moment she loved him, but she decides to make the most of the position.
Ann: Can you put into context, just because last week on the podcast, we were talking about Catherine of Aragon, and now we’re talking about the Boleyn family, how no one would have thought that any of this would happen, that he would end the marriage to Catherine of Aragon, let alone that he would marry a non-royal. So, when past portrayals, and I understand like the dramatic reasons for it, show Thomas Boleyn scheming to get his daughter to… Like, that wouldn’t have been anyone’s plan to convince the King to fall in love with your daughter so much that he creates the Church of England, like, to marry your daughter who’s not even royal. How out of the bounds of possibility would that have even seemed, do you think?
Tracy: Oh, completely. I’m so pleased you raised this because the fact that it’s such a familiar story numbs us to it, I think. Oh yes, Henry was so passionately in love with Anne Boleyn that he set aside his first wife, created a new church, told the pope where to go and was able to marry Anne. And you think, come on, this was huge! I don’t think anybody believed Henry was going to go through with this, most of all Anne, probably, and that’s why she kept him at arm’s length because, “Well, I don’t want to be a mistress, and clearly this marriage isn’t going to happen. Come on, get real.”
And then, it does happen, and then there are shockwaves across the country, and indeed across Europe because this thing is unprecedented. England has been loyal to the Roman Catholic Church for centuries. Henry himself had been given the title Fidei Defensor or Defender of the Faith because he was a good son of the Roman Catholic Church, and then, of course, it all went rather wrong. This was too much for people. And this is why poor Anne was scapegoated for it. She was known as “the great whore,” “the concubine,” because the people of England blamed her for this seismic change, and they didn’t want any of it. They wanted the monasteries to stay. They wanted the old faith that they knew and understood and loved to stay, and they certainly didn’t want an end to the marriage of Henry and a queen who they adored. I don’t think even those who quite liked the new reformed religion thought that Catherine of Aragon should have gone the way she did. She was very, very widely liked and respected. So yes, shocking. We mustn’t lose sight of that just because it’s become such a familiar tale.
Ann: Oh, exactly. And I would imagine that’s a challenge for you as well to be writing… When I was reading your book, I’m like, “Oh, here we go.” You know, it’s like, you can’t not include that part of the story, but I always want, even when I read a nonfiction book, I think, “Maybe it’ll all work out.” No, it still doesn’t.
Tracy: So did I! When I was writing it, I was thinking, “Oh! Actually, if Anne just does that, and maybe she could…” and it’s like, you know what’s going to happen. I think the challenge is to make it feel present and current for the reader so that you’re not thinking, “Uh-oh. Well, no point reading the rest of it.” So, that sense of immediacy and living moment by moment was what I tried to achieve, and I think that’s where setting it at Hever helped actually, because a lot of the downfall is through the eyes of the servants. They’re waiting at Hever for news and what on earth is going on? So, that actually helped me to make it feel tense. Even though the ultimate ending perhaps is well known, other elements of the book, other storylines, are less well known. So yes, hopefully the jeopardy was maintained.
Ann: Well, no, I would say, like, having read it, I think you did a really good job of, in the moment, Anne Boleyn doesn’t know that he’s going to do all these things because of his pursuit of her. She doesn’t know that when they get married, it’s going to end in disaster, her execution. So, I think you do a good job of writing in the moment characters who don’t know what’s going to happen, even as the reader.
Tracy: Oh, great. That’s brilliant, thank you. Yes, that’s what I definitely hoped to achieve. I suppose it’s a similar thing to, you know, in Wolf Hall, people know that Thomas Cromwell, it doesn’t end well, and yet, you know, I’m a huge fan of Hilary Mantel’s novels and you read them and you think, “Oh! Maybe… Maybe he’ll escape, and it’s all good.” [chuckles] Yeah.
Ann: You mentioned the servants, and I do want to talk about that because you said earlier on, as little information as we have about the Boleyns themselves, there’s nothing about the servants, but you include some servant characters in your book. So, how did you come up with what their characters would be like, what their tasks would be, what their life was like?
Tracy: So, this is the most fictional part of the book, because actually, beyond knowing that Hever would probably have had ten or twelve servants, so little is known about the household at Hever. In fact, we only have the name of one servant who has survived in the records and that is Robert Cranwell, who was the steward to Thomas Boleyn, and I’m afraid I made him a pretty despicable villain, as you will know in the novel. We don’t know the names, details of any of the other servants, so what I did was a lot of research into kind of noble households of a sort of comparable size to Hever, so that I knew how many servants to create and I focused in on a couple apart from Cranwell, and there would have been, because there were women at Hever, there would have been ladies maids, and probably my favourite of the servants to create and to cast a web of intrigue around was Esther, who I make the ladies maid of Anne and indeed her sister Mary, but she becomes particularly close to Anne.
Creating the world of the servants, it enabled me to get into Anne’s mind as well, because when you’re writing fiction, you can’t just keep saying what people are thinking, you have to enable them to express it, and it’s really helpful that masters and servants were much closer in Tudor periods than later periods, when it was more of a sort of a deferential relationship. Servants were seen and not heard, whereas in the Tudor period, servants were confidants and companions and friends. So, Anne would have been sharing her innermost thoughts and fears with Esther, and having Esther there, and indeed Aphra, the Irish servant of Lady Margaret, also enabled me to get across just the jeopardy, the peril of being a woman in Tudor England, and how little agency you had, and the danger that could befall you and indeed your reputation. And yeah, there’s an awful lot that happens to these poor female servants in my novel.
Ann: Well, I will say just the description you gave now just on the podcast about the size of Hever and things like that. So, not to spoil your book, but let’s say that you’re a young female servant and a man has got his sights set on you, there’s nowhere to hide. You’re not in a huge… You’re going to run into him constantly.
Tracy: Yeah, absolutely. You’d have to hope for an incredibly benevolent master who could either dismiss the predatory male or make sure that he leaves you alone, and that often didn’t happen. And so, there are real dangers, and women had so little power in this situation, and nobody would have blamed the male servant or superior, or even, like, the master of the house. That was a thing, certainly in the Duke of Norfolk’s household, where the master himself is sort of bedding all the maids. What are they going to do? They’ve got no power to resist him. So, even at this micro level of a fairly small household, women are in peril almost on a daily basis, and I really wanted to convey that. Yeah, without spoiling it for your readers, hence, let’s just say Robert Cranwell being quite such a despicable villain. [chuckles]
Ann: This was something else I did. I told you, I did, just kind of, like, double-checking like, “Okay, Margaret Butler, did this really happen to her?” Cranwell was someone else where I was just like, “Who is this guy?” So, I saw like, okay, this is the one name that is known, but we don’t… Probably not actually a villain, but for the purposes of your book, quite an effective villain.
Tracy: Exactly. And I do often apologize to Cranwell, saying, “I’m sorry, you probably weren’t a villain, but I made you one.” But there is one piece of evidence, albeit brief, that he may not have been that nice a character because he wrote a letter to Thomas Cromwell soon after the death of Thomas Belin, his master, and it’s very cold. Like, he’s just reporting Thomas’s death, and then immediately out for himself, “What can I get out of this? Now my master’s dead.” So, that gave me enough. I thought there’s enough justification to make him nasty. [laughs]
Ann: Well, honestly, that reminds me, in a way, of the way that historians for a very long time have taken the evidence that Jane and George Boleyn didn’t have any children as evidence that they must have hated each other, and he was probably gay, and she was probably, like… So, can you explain how you approach their relationship and Jane Boleyn?
Tracy: Yes. And talking about the, sort of, I was going to say lesser-known female characters, Jane Belin is well known, but she has been vilified and misrepresented, and I really wanted to set the record straight with this book. Because yes, you’re absolutely right, the fact that they probably didn’t have children – there is a merest hint possibly of a child between Jane and George, but they probably didn’t have children – which, therefore, the supposition is: miserable marriage, and George was either gay or just constantly womanizing. I put a different slant on this, as you will know, not necessarily George, who is gay in my book, and that, yes, there isn’t perhaps a great deal of affection between them for much of the book, but then they do actually grow to be quite close towards the end.
But what I really wanted to get across with Jane’s story is she’s not the villain piece. And I think, actually, she only really became the villain of Anne’s story during the reign of Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, when Elizabeth couldn’t blame her father for getting rid of her mother, so she needed a scapegoat. This is when this myth arose that Jane was the one who gave the incriminating evidence that sent Anne and her brother George, Jane’s own husband, to their deaths, and actually, there’s no evidence that she did that. In fact, what there is evidence is that Jane was pleading for her husband’s life to Henry and petitioning him to allow her to go and visit him in the tower. She’s been so maligned, and I think so unjustifiably maligned.
People cite the fact that, “Oh, well, Jane clearly did it so that her own career was protected,” because then she went on to serve Jane Seymour, and then Anne of Cleves, and then Catherine Howard. But Jane probably didn’t have any choice whatsoever; she would have probably been just summoned back to court to serve the next queen. That doesn’t necessarily mean that she was guilty of stitching up her sister-in-law and her husband. So, I really wanted to, you can tell how passionate I was about this, to give readers a different Jane, and I hope a Jane slightly closer to the truth than that villainous reputation.
Ann: And I think that’s something else too, that when you’re Elizabeth or anyone, like, looking back, you can be like, “Okay, well, maybe this is what she wanted because this is how her life turned out.” But that would have been preposterous to think that Jane Boleyn would marry George and think, “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to frame… I’ll give this deposition, and then that will mean that Anne and George will be executed, but I, Jane Boleyn, will get this good job.” That’s not a plan! No one can foresee those results.
Tracy: No, no. It’s a terrible plan! “I’m going to marry into this family and then destroy the same family, and my name will be mud even if I have got a job at court still.” It makes no logical sense whatsoever. So many myths around Jane and I would say around the Boleyns, full stop. People think they know them, and we’re just going on myths. It’s like Chinese whispers over the centuries that have made the Boleyns something that I don’t think they were at all.
Ann: And so, in terms of the Boleyns’ sort of rise and fall, over centuries, you know, they were making these good marriages and getting these more prestigious positions. But once Anne Boleyn, once her downfall, once when she’s executed, the whole family feels those ripple effects, like, the Boleyns stop being a presence, right?
Tracy: Yeah, and it’s quite sudden and brutal, really. It’s the end of the Boleyns as any kind of political force in England. They don’t have a renaissance, unless you count, you know, they certainly do in the form of Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, Queen of England. But the Boleyn family itself, no, it falls very, very rapidly.
Even though Thomas Boleyn has served Henry VIII brilliantly from the beginning of the reign, he’s out; he’s kicked out of court when his children are executed. Poor Thomas, as well as suffering the loss of two children in the most horrific manner possible, he’s stripped of all his titles, his positions, his wealth. Even Hever is taken from Thomas, and it’s forfeit to the crown, although Henry very generously allows Thomas to at least live out his days there, but very cruelly makes Thomas come back to court just over a year after his daughter’s execution and his son’s execution, to attend the christening of his new son by the woman who had replaced his daughter, Anne. You know, it’s just mind-boggling the cruelty of Henry VIII. And then Thomas, he doesn’t hang about at court. He goes back to Hever, and that’s where he dies in March 1539. So, one imagines those three years, or just shy of three years, that he outlived his daughter Anne and son George must have been just heart-rending. You know, he was a broken man, I think, from that day forward.
Ann: Well, and then what I find really interesting, and I hadn’t known this before, is that ultimately Henry VIII gifts Hever to Anne of Cleves, his wife, who they amicably separate. They have a conscious uncoupling. [Tracy laughs] So, in terms of the history of this home, Anne of Cleves lives there for some time!
Tracy: Yeah. There is more than one Queen Anne at Hever Castle, and I love this. Actually, if I’m honest, Anne of Cleves is my favourite of the six. I just love her so much. I mean, what a success story. People dismiss her as the ugly wife; I don’t think she was ugly at all. I think probably she was pretty horrified at the thought of marrying Henry VIII, and that showed, he got rid of that marriage very quickly. But she did brilliantly out of it with this, you know, annulment settlement with five palaces, £20,000 a year, and Hever as well. Henry leases it to her for as long as she wants it. And Anne of Cleves loves Hever; and she invests in Hever; she builds a new long gallery at the top of the house in the latest fashion.
I also love the fact there is just a tantalizing prospect that it might have been through Anne of Cleves that Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth, first visited her mother’s beloved home. Because we know that Anne of Cleves was very close to her youngest stepdaughter, Elizabeth. Elizabeth did spend time with Anne; she visited her away from court. So, it’s very possible that she came to Hever and therefore discovered the place that had meant so much to her mother. One of the many reasons I love Anne of Cleves, just that possibility of what she did for Elizabeth.
Ann: And so, Hever itself, you spent time there. It’s still in existence, it’s still well maintained, it’s a place people can visit. There’s so many homes that don’t exist anymore. Why do you think this one… What were the series of events, I guess, that made it still exist today?
Tracy: Well, Hever passed through several different owners after Anne of Cleves, and then it went to other noble families. It fell into a bit of disrepair. When you see some of the old watercolour paintings of Hever, there’s cattle roaming free around the castle, and it’s all looking a little bit sorry for itself.
But then, what saved Hever in particular was the wealthy American family, the Astor family, who in the 1900s took over Hever and they transformed it into their place for fashionable country parties, you know, shooting parties and the like. And so, Hever was much altered in terms of the interiors. But William Waldorf Astor absolutely loved Hever, and he tried to stay true to the Tudor feel. So, there’s a bit of mock Tudor in there, but it saved the castle.
In recent times, the curators have restored the Boleyn apartments to how they would have looked at the time that Anne and her family were there. I know you’re hoping to visit one day, and you will get the best of it because it’s looking better than ever at the moment. You really step through that first courtyard and into the house, and you get a sense of the Boleyns as soon as you’re there. You can still smell the wood smoke clinging to the walls of the kitchens, and there’s the rush matting on the floor. It’s just, at certain times of the day, you see the light from the moat reflected on the ceilings of the upstairs rooms. It’s the most atmospheric and beautiful place, and thank goodness for the Astors because otherwise maybe it wouldn’t have survived.
Ann: It just sounds like such a magical experience for you to be able to time travel, really, into the setting of your book. You just described the reflection of the moat, these details. I don’t think a novelist could think of that unless you’re in the house and you saw it happening.
Tracy: Exactly. You’d have to have an incredible imagination to be sitting just at your desk and thinking about all these things. It was so inspiring for me, it really was, to just immerse myself in this world. I knew Hever already, I loved it, but I feel like I got to know every nook and cranny of that castle. It was joyous, actually. I’ve always said, if in doubt, take refuge in the past. One of the reasons I love being a historian is that you can escape to other worlds, and hopefully that’s what my readers of The House of Boleyn will be able to do as well. If you’ve had enough of 21st-century antics going on around the world, then why not retreat to the 1500s and a beautiful castle in the English countryside for a while? [chuckles]
Ann: Well, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. Your book is, when this comes out, it’ll be just available now in North America. Where can people keep up with events you’re doing and things like that?
Tracy: Sure. I’m on social media: Instagram, I’m @Tracy.Borman and X, I’m @TracyBorman. I’m basically on all the platforms. I also have a website, which is TracyBorman.co.uk, where I list what I’m up to, events, new books coming up. So yeah, it’s pretty hard to escape me, I think, at the moment. I’m really on The House of Boleyn trail at the moment.
Ann: Yeah, exactly. And I have to presume that Hever, is there a gift shop there? They would have to be selling copies of this book, I have to imagine.
Tracy: I’m happy to say they are. In fact, they’ve gone one better, because if you go to Hever, they give you a card with a QR code on it, and if you scan that, you can listen to some of the book as you’re touring Hever. And so, you get to kind of imagine it in the world of the Boleyns. So, yeah, Hever have been amazing. One of my last events of the book tour is actually at Hever, very fittingly. So, I will be telling the story of The House of Boleyn at the House of Berlin.
Ann: Oh, that’s so perfect. I was almost thinking, like, you could do a walking tour of The House of Boleyn at Hever, but that’s effectively what they’re doing with these QR codes.
Tracy: Exactly, exactly. So, I’m really pleased they thought of that. I think it’s a great way of tying the past and present and helping visitors to imagine this world without going around it with their heads in a book, they can listen. And so, I think that’s going to be quite effective.
Ann: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much again for chatting with me today.
Tracy: Oh, it’s been a joy. I think a sign of a good podcast is how quickly the time speeds by, and this one has felt like about five minutes. So, thank you. It’s been a joy.
Ann: [laughs] Thank you so much.
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So, Tracy’s book is called The House of Boleyn, and is now available in North America, as well as in the UK and elsewhere. It’s really, if you know the story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, if you do or if you don’t, it’s a really interesting and different point of view. Just everything that she explained about how it takes place at this house; the house is such a character. You know, add it to my very long bucket list of things that I would like to visit the next time I get over to the UK. Tracy’s also got a lot going on. If you visit her website, which is TracyBorman.co.uk, you can find out all the events she has coming up, including she’s going to be doing a tour called Tudors on Tour. So, she’s going to be going to theatres across England through the month of October, and so you can book tickets to go and see her doing that. She’s such a captivating speaker; it sounds like such a fun talk. I hope some of you are over there and are able to make it out to that.
I also wanted to say, so this podcast, Vulgar History, it’s here because of the support of listeners like you who either listen to the advertisements on this podcast or who, if you want to get the podcast ad-free, you can join my Patreon, which is Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. For $1 a month, you can get the ad-free episodes as well as early episodes, and to see the posts I make on Patreon as well. If you’re able to support this podcast for $6 or more a month, you can get the ad-free episodes early, as well as bonus episodes featuring myself and my friends. For instance, most recently, we had a discussion of my favourite Shakespeare play, Titus Andronicus, available to the Patreon members at that level. I also did a Zoom Live recently that those patrons are able to watch and take part in. And as well as there’s a discussion right now, myself and my friend Gina Berry talking about the movie The Odyssey, so you can get that all there.
And actually, speaking of myself and my friend Gina Berry, I do have a second podcast called NeferTV, which is a TV recap podcast. We’re currently going through the TV show Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which Gina has watched before and I have not watched, and we’re having a nice time there. So, you can look up NeferTV wherever you get your podcasts.
I also want to mention our brand partner, Common Era Jewelry, which is a small business. It’s a women-owned business that makes beautiful heirloom jewelry out of gold, solid gold, as well as more affordable gold vermeil, inspired by women from history, as well as from mythology and from fiction. Most of their pieces are inspired by, like, ancient Rome, ancient Greece; you can get some real Odyssey tie-in pieces of jewelry from them, like, there’s Cersei, there’s Clytemnestra, there’s Penelope. But also, Torie, the owner, couldn’t help herself but include an Anne Boleyn design as well. So, there’s a beautiful Anne Boleyn pendant that you can get inspired by… We’ll talk about this in later episodes, but what did Anne Boleyn look like? We don’t really know, but she was inspired by some of the portrayals of Anne Boleyn that are out there. So, if you want to honour Anne Boleyn with your own necklace and you want to get a discount, go to CommonEra.com/Vulgar15 or use code ‘VULGAR15’ when you’re checking out there to get 15% off your order from Common Era.
Anyway, we’re in it. We’re in the Tudor Era talking about the Boleyns. I wanted to… I alluded to this earlier on. So, the connection between Anne Boleyn, her Irish granny actually, Margaret, there’s a connection between them and two women who we talked about last season (we were talking about the Regency Era), the Ladies of Llangollen. One of them was a Butler, so the same as Anne Boleyn’s granny. Eleanor Butler was from the same Kilkenny Butlers. Apparently, there’s still lots of butlers in that region. I checked with my Irish correspondent, Karyn Moynihan, just to confirm that. So anyway, I love these connections between the seasons and between different people. And just this connection between, I don’t know, a genealogist could do this family tree, but the connection between Anne Boleyn and Eleanor Butler. When Eleanor Butler got to live to a ripe old age and kind of do her own thing, whereas Anne Boleyn did not. Just interesting to know that they’re all related and they have Ireland in common.
Anyway, we’ll be back next week with another Tudor-themed episode. Until then, keep your pants on and your tits out.
Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster. Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Vulgar History artwork by Karyn Moynihan. Social media videos by Magdalena Denson. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod. Get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com.
References:
Tracy Borman, author of the new novel The House of Boleyn, joins us to discuss all the Boleyn family drama.
Buy a copy of Tracy’s book The House of Boleyn (affiliate link)
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